Wednesday, 16 September 2009

UC Santa Barbara

Today I went up to UC Santa Barbara in order to get ready for orientation tomorrow. My Uncle took the day off to drive me up here.

The journey took around 3 1/2 hours due to heavy traffic going into downtown LA. Gosh!!!...they have to sort out the traffic here - maybe a congestion charge would do or maybe not. It was an interesting site driving around LA, on the one hand you had the beautiful blue skies and the sun shining down on you and on the other, you had an extremely thick layer of smog just sitting on the horizon. After my uncle drove through much of the LA traffic and exactly halfway to Santa Barbara, we decided we were hungry and stopped at Jack in the Box in Thousand Oaks. It was my first time at Jack in the Box and I actually found the food ok...I ahd their chicken, cheese and bacon burger. For the remainder of the journey, my uncle decided that I would drive the other half of the Journey to Santa Barbara. It was a really good drive with mesmerising views...After passing through some very steep hills, you are suddenly hit by Oxnard, CA...and then by beautiful beaches and the glittering ocean on one side and mountains on the other. It was a shame I couldn't take pics as I was driving.

I met my first roundabout in the states today at UCSB, which was exciting. there's an astonishing amount of roundabouts on campus for the USA....especially for bikes. The campus itself is pretty big and very nice with the ocean on one side and mountains on the other. It seemed very empty today as people were not back to class yet. After settling into my temporary accomadation, we went for a self guided campus tour. It was like a normal university that you would find in the States...lots of buildings - apart from the fact that there's a lagoon there, it's right by the sea and two beaches next to it. We also explored a small part of Isla Vista, mainly looking at where the shops are and at Del Playa. Del Playa Drive is the main party street...apparently its manic and chaos down there on most weekends and especially Halloween.